The most familiar sheet of water, viewed from a new hilltop, yields a novel and unexpected pleasure. When we have traveled a few m...iles, we do not recognize the profiles even of the hills which overlook our native village, and perhaps no man is quite familiar with the horizon as seen from the hill nearest to his house, and can recall its outline distinctly when in the valley. We do not commonly know, beyond a short distance, which way the hills range which take in our houses and farms in their sweep. As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere. It is an important epoch when a man who has always lived on the east side of a mountain, and seen it in the west, travels round and sees it in the east. Yet the universe is a sphere whose centre is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so central as a man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air--... a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But whether a child is male or female, fathers are needed for their "otherness," to put a healthy wedge between mother and child, ...to be a haven from real or imagined maternal injustice or excessive hovering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We were too light, Electra. Now our feet press down in the earth like the wheels of a cart in its groove. Come with me, and we wil...l walk heavily, bending under the weight of our heavy load.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence ...as a sexual being--while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up. Normally we don't experience, at least don't want to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfillment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here lies a man who was killed by lightning; He died when his prospects seemed to be brightening.... He might have cut a flash in this world of trouble, But the flash cut him, and he lies in the stubble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't think of myself as a sex symbol or a servant. I think of myself as somebody who knows how to open the door of a 747 in the... dark, upside down, and under water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understan...ding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »